No Man Is An Island In The World Today

February 07, 1986|By Ellen Goodman, Washington Post Writers Group.

When the news came, we were in a ramshackle bar on the edge of a beach that might have posed for the travel posters that entice you to ``Get Away From It All.`` We had chosen this Caribbean island deliberately, to really vacate, to leave more than the weather behind us, to peel off the anxious layers of daily life along with our boots and gloves.

Instantly, the radio had changed all that. Our heads were home or at least in Cape Canaveral. We felt as inappropriately dressed in our bathing suits as a garish visitor to a funeral. We sat in this odd mourning garb and listened, feeling simply out of place.

Later on, several natives who knew we were Americans asked if we had heard about ``the tragedy.`` Within hours, everyone here, and surely someone in every country on Earth, knew.

The travel poster, you see, was out of date. There is no ``away from it all`` anymore. The same tools that let us keep in touch with people in another country, with work in another hemisphere, with events on another continent, also make it impossible to disconnect.

I remembered then how every astronaut who has circled the planet comes home to report that he or she has seen no borders, no frontiers, no fences. There are no neatly colored countries from the perspective of outer space. The Earth is one.

Their image has provided a powerful counter message for those of us who grew up memorizing maps as if they had some intrinsic meaning, instead of being what they are: records of power struggles and national pride. From above, they`ve seen the natural, and the possible, unity.

So too, the news of seven space deaths followed the path of that unity, traveling across borders, bouncing off satellites, landing with utter disregard for any national frontier. This, the ability to communicate anywhere, instantly, is what makes the astronaut vision real. It is what pulls the world together and makes an anachronism of our small-minded maps.

My husband and I were not the only ones who felt out of place or, rather, in two places that Tuesday. Most of us live double lives. One is on the turf below our feet, the other is in the space created of phones and radios, television and computers. One is in our own yard, city, state; the other is in the world.

This double life is not entirely unique to our time or our technology. In the history book of the Caribbean islands that I brought to this white sand beach, the 17th Century reads like a Restoration comedy. Madcap Europeans sailed in one port and out the other, claiming 25-million-year-old volcanic islands for the crown. Pirates, privateers, navies sent the flags of Spain, France, Holland and England up and down the poles of one island fort after another. Not even 17th-Century settlers could get away from it all. They lived on an island and in the world.

But in those days, news traveled only as fast as a ship. It was sometimes a year before the enemies fighting in the Caribbean would hear that they were now allies. With little ceremony and less reason, they turned their guns against new enemies who might already have become allies at some distant European treaty table.

Now news moves faster than any human. The information gap is as brief as a transcontinental echo. We can ``hook up`` people in Manila and Tripoli and Johannesburg for a chat in a television studio in Washington. We can send words and pictures of a space tragedy to every remote spot on the Earth.

All these lines of communication draw people together, enhancing the sense and the capacity for oneness. Yet the images and the news they bring are often those of conflict. Nations go on raising and lowering flags, making allies and enemies.

I don`t know if some future generation will regard our own conflicts to be as ludicrous as those played out in the 17th-Century Caribbean Sea. It is easy to see the absurdity in old conflicts. The difference today is we have missiles that also unify the Earth, with the single threat of extinction.

We live today with both the lofty possibility of one world without boundaries and the deadly image of a whole Earth wasteland. Yet our leaders are neither hopeful enough nor frightened enough. They are stuck in the 17th Century, making maps as if we hadn`t already transcended them. No, there is no way to ``get away from it all`` anymore.